The South Dorset Ridgeway

Recording the Ceremonial Landscape

Maiden Castle and the South Dorset Ridgeway landscape (NMR 23488/280 © English Heritage) The South Dorset Ridgeway is a stunning natural landscape: a spine of chalk capped with flinty clay rises high above the shingle ridge of Chesil Bank on the Dorset coast. The Ridgeway was the focus for prehistoric activities for thousands of years.

Maiden Castle was built at the east end of the Ridgeway in the Iron Age and 2000 years before that the Ridgeway was used as an extensive cemetery, with graves marked by hundreds of Bronze Age round barrows. Surveying the long barrow on Sheep Down (Hazel Riley)  The earliest monuments, however, are not well known. These are the Neolithic long barrows, communal tombs built by some of our earliest farming communities around 6000 years ago. All of the long barrows have now been surveyed and recorded with the help of local volunteers, as part of a Community Archaeology Project, organised by English Heritage and the Dorset AONB.  We have also carried out geophysical surveys at some of the sites to locate buried features such as the side ditches of ploughed out long barrows.
Geophysical survey of the long barrow west of Maiden Castle (Hazel Riley) 

For further information on this project, please contact Hazel Riley in English Heritage's Exeter office on: (01392) 824901 or hazel.riley@english-heritage.org.uk.